Adventurous August

The First YA Section Book Club!

Hey, y’all!

I’m Jack, a co-author of The YA Section, and today I’m happy to announce our first book club on Substack! If you weren’t already aware, before this blog was The YA Section, it was a Blogger publication titled Controversial Book Club. And in February of this year, we hosted a book club for our subscribers. Twenty people attended and we all read Lois Lowry’s The Giver over the course of the month. Everyone had lots of fun and we were really hoping to host the club again sooner, but with the transition to Substack, we never really got on with it. However, this month, now that we have time, we’ll finally be able to host another book club! So, let’s go over this book club’s theme, the details, rules and regulations, and more.

The Theme

For this month’s book club, we’ll be exploring the theme of adventure, as you may have deduced from the theme title: Adventurous August. Just like last time, we’ll be accepting book suggestions from all of y’all as well as brainstorming our own candidates for this month’s reading. We’re looking for young adult novel suggestions that really delve into the adventurous spirit. Whatever the genre—fantasy, dystopian, sci-fi, romance—the book must really embrace brave quests, character development, and the spirit of adventure.

One obvious book that fits this criteria is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit; Bilbo lived a quiet life before being whisked away on an adventure that will change him forever. Keep in mind, however, that we only have three to four weeks to read the selected book. And while some of you may have time to commit to reading large chunks of a book like The Hobbit every week, others may be too caught up with school starting and other things to read a book of this length. So keep this in mind when suggesting a good YA adventure book.

Note: You are not required to suggest a book, however if you have certain preferences or a book in mind, it would be helpful to make a suggestion. If we don’t receive enough suggestions, Abby, Ken, and I will either select a book on our own or create a poll from our own suggestions. If we do receive enough suggestions or we decide to create our own, we will host a poll on next week’s August Highlight.

How This Will Work

So if you were with us last time we hosted a book club, this will go a little bit differently from before due to the platform change. And if you weren’t with us in our last book club, pay attention.

Chapter Assignments

Once a book is voted on, I will create a schedule of weekly chapter assignments. Then, I will post the assignments on The YA Section subscribers chat every Saturday. If you have access to the chat, you may reply to the thread when you have completed the assignment. If you cannot access the chat, I’ll be sending the chat threads out as emails as well so you will at least be able to view the assignment details.

Book Discussions

Every Friday, I or Ken will post links to our Zoom discussions. Basically, we’ll all just discuss the chapters we read that week over the course of one hour. We’ll ask only those wishing to participate in the conversation to join the meetings. You may choose to turn on your camera or not. Seeing as less than 20 people joined our discussions last time but we now have over 100 subscribers, I expect that the conversations may be a little different than before.

(Note: Discussion time slots will be voted on in the registration form. Depending on the overall availability, we may host either one or two Friday book discussions.)

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Rules & Regulations

For the safety of our authors and book club participants and the efficiency of our reading, we do have a few rules and regulations we must enforce.

1. This is a teen-only book club — Apologies to all of our adult subscribers, but for our subscribers’ safety, we have to keep this book club limited to young adults. That said, if you are under the age of 13 or over the age of 19, you will still be able to follow along as we read. However, you will not be permitted to join our Friday discussions unless you are the parent of a teen participant.

2. You must register if you wish to attend our book discussions — We want to know how many people will be reading along and joining our discussions. So, we ask all of you wishing to participate in the book club to register with the form attached at the bottom of this post.

3. Participants must attend at least one book discussion — To ensure that you are actually participating in the book club, we do ask that you attend at least one of our Friday book discussions. If you are not able to at all, please do not register.

4. You must be a YA Section subscriber to join — This may seem unnecessary, but we do want every book club participant to be subscribed to The YA Section again for our safety but also so we know you’re fully interested in the book club and The YA Section’s content.

If I’m not forgetting anything, that should be it. We do realize that these terms do decrease the number of you who will be able to join the book club, and I do apologize for this but it’s all just for our safety.

And that’s all I have to say concerning this month’s YA Section book club Adventurous August! Please suggest a book for this month’s reading; it would be very helpful. Don’t forget to register with the form below and like this post if you’re excited!

Thank you so much for being here. I hope you’ll be able to join this month’s book club and I’ll see you in my next post!

Have a blessed day! :)